Ah, the eternal question: “What’s the best pet?” that so many hunters tend to ask, hoping for a very specific, magical answer for the one in-game beast that they should tame to meet all of their needs. Usually it starts off like the video does: “which pet is the best for raiding?” …which usually really translates to “which pet is the best to have with me at all times?”

Look into those eyes. You know you want one. You know you need him by your side while you traipse around the new Azeroth, keeping him safe from harm. And now you can have one! The Moonkin Hatchling and the Lil’ Ragnaros are both available in the Blizzard Store for $10 USD each.

Once you pay, you’ll get a little present to your Battle.net account when you log in to the game with your new companion. Both are only available as digital downloads, and once you buy one you get the companion on all characters associated with your Battle.net account, current or future.

Will you be picking up one of the new companions, or is ten bucks a little steep for an in-game pet? Let us know in the comments!

Look into its adorable, huge, loving eyes. It longs for you to cuddle it. And then it will cast Starfire on you and it’ll loot your body. Or it might love you forever and follow you around. You never know until you have one!

The Moonkin Hatchling above is the alliance version: the horde version predictably looks like a Tauren Druid, just shrunk down and made super-adorable. Lil’ Ragnaros is no slouch either, in all of his heated swirly glory. The images above and video below come to you courtesy of the folks at MMO Champion, who found all this good stuff lurking in the depths of the latest Cataclysm beta build.

Want to see the video? Click the jump below to see both Moonkin Hatchlings and Lil’ Ragnaros!

If you haven’t seen or heard the news yet, an entertaining new minigame has made an appearance in the Cataclysm beta called “Peacebloom vs. Ghouls,” which looks and plays an awful lot like the fabulous tower-defense-style game, Plants vs. Zombies. The video above, from the venerable TotalBiscuit, shows the minigame in all of its glory, and the best thing about the minigame is that when it’s all over, you get a special in-game companion, the Singing Sunflower!

Besides being fun and kind of novel if you’re into PvZ, you get a pretty cool reward for finishing the quest: a “singing sunflower” pet! I actually had no idea this information was public until Hashimoto linked me to TotalHalibut’s video earlier tonight… incidentally, I was right in the middle of recording the sunflower’s voice when I watched it. ^_^ I am so excited about voicing a WoW-pet because what can I say … I’m a big nerd.

Yeah, color me excited for this when Cataclysm comes out. I’m not even normally a big tower-defense person, but this game has a special place in my heart.

If you’re headed to BlizzCon or you’ve purchased a virtual ticket, you probably already know that BlizzCon attendees get a special pet for coming to the show. Well, the special pet for this year has been announced, and here he is, in all of his adorable, destructive glory: Deathy, the Destroyer Murloc! (I prefer to call him Death-Murky, but whatever.)

“Death will rise from the tide!” Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain once warned — and at BlizzCon 2010, the band’s dire musical prophecy will finally come to pass. Everyone who attends this year’s BlizzCon or purchases the BlizzCon Virtual Ticket will receive an exclusive set of murlocalyptic in-game items for World of Warcraft and StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. World of Warcraft players will be joined by Deathy, a murloc companion decked out as Deathwing and doing his best to strike fear into the hearts of Azeroth’s crustacean population. You’ll also be able to display your tidal pride in StarCraft II with a Murloc Marine character portrait and a pair of deep-sea decals to emblazon on your units, each with a different terran, protoss, and zerg design.

Even Starcraft II players get in on the action? Sheesh. If you managed to snag a ticket, congratulations! (We’re still waiting on Blizzard to tell us if we can go.) If you didn’t, and don’t think you’ll make it, virtual tickets are still on sale!

The fine folks at MMO Champion found this one – a video of a yet-unreleased and unavailable Deathwing Whelp (Death Whelp?) that, if tradition persists, will likely be the Collector’s Edition pet for Cataclysm when it’s released, likely later this year.

The Collector’s Edition for vanilla WoW had your selection of a Zergling, a Panda, or a mini-Diablo, for Burning Crusade you got a Netherwhelp, and for Wrath of the Lich King you got a Frost Whelp. It makes sense that this would be the colllector’s edition pet this time around.

Over at the World of Warcraft Livejournal Community there was some heated discussion about this just being another whelp pet to lure people into buying the Collector’s Editions, and that Blizzard should return to the way it handled the original World of Warcraft launch and give people a selection of multiple pets. What do you think? Is the Netherwhelp enough to make you want to pick up the Collector’s Edition, or will you give it a pass unless there’s something in there better than this? Leave us a comment!

Remember when I stumbled on the above video of the Celestial Steed? At the time we had no idea where it would come from, but now we know all too well – we got the word from Wow.com today that the Celestial Steed and Lil’ XT are both available to purchase in the Blizzard Store.

The Celestial Steed mount is available to purchase for $25.00 US, and the Lil XT pet is available for $10.00 US. Both of them will work at whatever riding level you have, so you don’t have to wait until you level up your riding skill to even use the Celestial Steed, for example.

This will likely re-inflame debate over micro-payments and pay-to-play items in a game like World of Warcraft; but for those of us who really don’t care all that much, we can just sit back, drop the cash if we have it, and enjoy the pretty.

This is the kind of marketing that we expect from Blizzard. A lot of people who play World of Warcraft also play other Blizzard games (like myself) and are looking forward to purchasing new ones when they come out. For example, I’m looking forward to Starcraft 2, and an in-game pet for World of Warcraft like this is definitely a good reason to pre-order the collector’s edition.

You couldn’t move without hearing news about this yesterday, especially if you know or have pet collectors in your guild! It’s good news, regardless – coming soon to the Blizzard Store will be two new plushie pets; a Wind Rider Cub and a Gryphon Hatchling!

They’re adorable little plushies as is, perfect gifts for the stuffed-animal-loving-WoW-player you know, but here’s the clincher: each one of them will come with a code to get the non-combat pet in-game! This alone will be more than enough to make some of the pet collectors in my guild buy the plushie, but then again – who can resist having a non-combat pet both in and out of game?

The pug is finally mine (as you can see above, that’s my screen cap), but I have to admit, that hundred random people came and went pretty quickly. Before the patch came out, I thought it would be pretty difficult to group with a hundred random people and get the Perky Pug, but once I got started using the Dungeon Finder, it was all downhill from there.

The same has been true across the realms too, I’ve seen more and more people flying the title “The Patient,” which comes with the achievement for grouping with 50 random people, called Looking for Many, and some people running about with their new pug pets after having completed Looking for Multitudes.

I’ve seen praises and horror stories about the Dungeon Finder so far, especially over at the World of Warcraft LiveJournal Community, where both the hate and the love is running wild and rampant.

If you’ve been running instances using the dungeon finder, whether you love it or you hate it, how are you coming towards your title or your Perky Pug? Are you running for badges and gear upgrades, or are you running for lack of anything better to do? Maybe you have your pug already? Let me know in the comments!